Some Small, Great Hope

Changing my actions so as to change my circumstances, I can perhaps make the circumstances like my dreams. Then when whatever "someday" is comes around, maybe I'll find that by making my dreams a reality on my way to them, I will be a bit more ready for them when they inevitably still catch me by surprise. But I think that perhaps that's exactly the sort of behavior fit for that faraway land of hopes and heartache. Because I don't know for certain if there will be a light at the end of this tunnel when I come to it, but I do certainly suspect that it is just the sort of place in which one could light a very great fire no matter the darkness. And so that's just what I'm doing now, lighting these fires. In my own small way, I'm practicing eternity while I still live. In that way, there's a chance I can make a difference, light a fire, that's bigger than one life. Then what is death, worry, pain, fear? If you've already live so fully, then you've already lived forever. These passing doubts and hindrances can't possibly matter to someone who is passionately sold out to something that no longer plays by those rules. It's a small hope that I have, but it's all I have and therefore is also a great hope.

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"But let me tell you something wonderful, a mystery I'll probably never fully understand. We're not all going to die—but we are all going to be changed. You hear a blast to end all blasts from a trumpet, and in the time that you look up and blink your eyes—it's over. On signal from that trumpet from heaven, the dead will be up and out of their graves, beyond the reach of death, never to die again. At the same moment and in the same way, we'll all be changed. In the resurrection scheme of things, this has to happen: everything perishable taken off the shelves and replaced by the imperishable, this mortal replaced by the immortal. Then the saying will come true:

Death swallowed by triumphant Life!

Who got the last word, oh, Death?

Oh, Death, who's afraid of you now?

It was sin that made death so frightening and law-code guilt that gave sin its leverage, its destructive power. But now in a single victorious stroke of Life, all three—sin, guilt, death—are gone, the gift of our Master, Jesus Christ. Thank God!"
(1 Cor. 15:51-57 MSG)